Two-dose summer starts in the Vault
Brampton mayor Patrick Brown initiated the charge to allow 2,500 fully vaccinated health-care workers into the Scotiabank Arena after the Montreal Canadiens won in front of that many at home. But the province settled on 550 as the number permitted to watch the Toronto Maple Leafs try to take another step towards being denied a parade.
The new season of briefings
The top doctor of Ontario will be different this summer, as Dr. Kieran Moore takes over from Dr. David Williams at Queen’s Park, where a two-dose summer is being promised. And while the science table says schools can reopen on a regional basis now, the province is still keeping other restrictions in place until halfway through June.
Monday morning brought a vigil to Charlottetown’s statue of John A. Macdonald. The gathering in P.E.I. followed a weekend of despair over the ground-penetrating radar detection of a mass grave of 215 Indigenous children on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, which has prompted calls to investigate all such sites across the country.
Catching further distaste
New allegations against Roberto Alomar involve a woman who was 18 in 2014, working as a volunteer at a youth baseball camp run by the Toronto Blue Jays. Melissa Verge says she was propositioned for sex as the retired second baseman pressed his body into hers. The MLB cut ties with Alomar over allegations dating from the same year:
Paul Soles dead at 90. The actor who started out in 1953 at CFPL in London, Ontario, provided the voices of Hermey in 1964’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the title character in the 1967-1970 animated Spider-Man. Soles’s involvement with the CBC stretched 56 years, from Take 30 through My 90-Year-Old Roommate.
Finally, two minutes of grieving
Mustafa was introduced in the New York Times as a folk hero for a new generation on the occasion of his eight-song debut, When Smoke Rises, a title drawn from the 2018 broad-daylight murder of Toronto rapper Smoke Dawg. A music video for “The Hearse” reflects the rage he felt in Regent Park, even if it sounds like a love song: